Power efficiency: The next challenge for multi-gigabit-per-second Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi systems have been continuously evolving to provide a 10-fold increase in data rates every five years, exploiting higher frequencies and larger bandwidths. With each evolution, there has been an improvement in power efficiency along with data rates. This power efficiency improvement is becoming harder to sustain with increasing data rates, and power efficiency is suggested in this article as the next big challenge for multi-gigabit-per-second Wi-Fi systems. The impact of increased bandwidth on the baseband, mixed-signal, and RF design of Wi-Fi systems is studied. A low-power architecture suitable for large-bandwidth Wi-Fi systems is proposed to address the power efficiency challenge. This architecture scales with bandwidth and adapts bandwidth to the data rate requirements.